The set-top box (“STB”) has become an important device for end users (e.g., subscribers) who access media content services and the media content within those services. It is not uncommon for an STB to include or to be used in conjunction with digital video recording (“DVR”) technology, which may be used to record streamed media content to permanent storage (e.g., a hard disk) at an end user's premises for subsequent local access and playback.
A common problem experienced by users of traditional DVR technology is that of recording failures, which may have various causes. For example, an end user may set a recording schedule that configures an end-user device to locally record certain media content streams during scheduled transmissions of the media content streams. However, at the scheduled transmission times, sufficient network and/or local resources may not be available to receive and/or record the media content streams. As an example, sufficient network bandwidth may not be available to support concurrent transmissions of the media content streams to the end-user device. As another example, the end-user device may lack resources (e.g., tuners) to concurrently receive and/or record the media content streams. Typically, such a lack of resources causes at least one of the conflicting media content streams scheduled for recording to not be recorded.